It's A Jungle In Here

International foodie haven opens an even larger space in Eastgate

If Jungle Jim’s huge International Market
in Fairfield wasn’t big enough for you, a second location in Eastgate
boasts an even larger space at 215,000 square feet. This is the place to
get everything from kangaroo meat to hookahs. And if you can’t find,
say, the gluten-free eggrolls, either store’s employees will track them
down for you.

“We have people who come in and say,
‘We’ve been to China and we used to get long beans (snake beans) there
and we really want them,’ ” says Jungle Jim’s PR and Marketing
Coordinator Debby Hartinger. “So our produce people go and look there.
It just depends what people want and then we look all over for it.”

After strolling through the “Foodie
Entrance” portal consisting of a Caribou Coffee, a Colonel De spice
store and a small theater projecting a documentary on the store’s
founder, “Jungle” Jim Bonaminio, customers are whisked away to the
exotic locales of India, Asia, the Middle East, Scandinavia, Colombia,
Australia and Hawaii in the store’s International nexus, featuring
canned, bottled and frozen foods from those regions. “India” is one of
the growing departments in the store and one of the biggest in the U.S.
The store attracts people from across the globe who peruse the shelves
for familiar foods from their homeland, like chutneys and laddu flour
used in making sweet laddu balls.

The aisles are commodious, well organized and color-coded, making getting lost more of an adventure than a burden.

The impetus behind the new expansion was 20 years in the making.

“It’s really just (that) Jungle needed a
different challenge,” Hartinger says, though it took them a while to
find a suitable location.

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“Looking over here, we needed a place that was
close enough that Jungle could go to both places, yet far away that we
wouldn’t take customers from one location and move them to the other.”

There aren’t many differences between the
two stores except that Eastgate doesn’t offer classes yet (they
eventually will), Eastgate’s wine/beer section is larger (5,000 sq. feet
vs. 1,200 sq. feet) and some foods don’t sell as well at Eastgate as
they do in Fairfield.

As for Jungle himself, “What he liked
about Eastgate was he got to start at the beginning; with Fairfield it
was piece by piece,” says Hartinger.

Though the average grocery consumer shops
here for “normal” goods, gastronomes especially will be pleased with
items that seem to be catered to them — maple syrup butter found at the
cheese shop’s butter bar (you’d be surprised how many types of butter
there are), store-made mozzarella wrapped in pepperoni, pumpkin rolls
sold year-round in the bakery (pumpkin is the new bacon, after all),
Vegemite and 20 kinds of balsamic vinegar.

“Part of the draw here is that we have
things you can’t find anywhere else,” Hartinger says. “We have 1,400
different hot sauces here. It’s, like, wow! You can get anything here.”

Some of their hot sauces come from
private collectors, including Blair’s 2010 Halloween Reserve that’s
priced at a whopping $1,699.

Jungle’s produce department continues
with unusual foods: a fruit called a rambutan, with an eyeball texture
that tastes like a strawberry meshed with a grape; a four-foot-long
Florida sugar cane stick; green in-husk coconuts; Meyer lemons that are
sweet enough to make lemonade without sugar; and dozens of different
bananas.

The meat department is so huge it’s easy
to miss the frozen case labeled “Exotic Meats.” Have a hankering for
kangaroo medallions, wild boar, turtle meat (used in real turtle soup,
not mock) and duck fat to make duck fat fries? How about South African
Boerewors sausage or Biltong, a beef jerky-like delicacy?These things are common for Jungle, not so much elsewhere.

Also not pedestrian is the The Big
Cheese, a 7,155-pound behemoth Wisconsin cheese that they’ll (literally)
cut in a ceremony called Cut the Cheese.

“What is cool is it doesn’t look that
big, but it really is,” Hartinger says. “If you cut off 1 inch at the
top that equals 100 pounds.”

A two-hour tour of the store ends at
Candy Castle, a playground of Jelly Belly jellybeans, novelties, every
color of M&M’s imaginable and displays made from old amusement park
bumper cars.

“Don’t you feel like you’re in the Candyland?” Hartinger asks. “The thing I like about Jungle is he makes everything fun.”

And that’s exactly what makes Jungle
Jim’s so much better than going to your neighborhood grocery for boring
ol’ steak and potatoes.

The new JUNGLE JIM’S location is at 4450 Eastgate South Drive, Eastgate. Call 513-674-6000 or visit junglejims.com for more info.